


those who favor fire

by lapmonster



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mutants, Character Death, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, Gen, IRBB, Ichiruki Big Bang, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, M/M, Mutant Powers, Mutants, Psychological Torture, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 14:06:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10439340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapmonster/pseuds/lapmonster
Summary: Despite claiming to have no powers himself, Ichigo is heir to a mutant resistance forged by his parents but since his mother died all he has known is life on the lam. When the Kurosaki safehouse is compromised by government goons a bossy, beautiful diamond-encrusted figure named Rukia appears to aid them—but Ichigo’s father has already been captured. Together, they must reach the safety of headquarters to protect his sisters and claim Ichigo’s birthright as second-in-command. But no matter how much Rukia believes in it, Ichigo isn’t interested in the cause: he just wants to save his stupid father.(More ships and characters to come as the story is being written.)About use of tags vs. archive warnings:I claim the character death (that isn’t past or canonical) to be neither major nor minor: they are characters who do not play a huge role in this fic but may in your heart so keep that in mind. There is no explicitly featured rape/non-con but there are threats and references, especially in relation to hypnotism and dub-con. There is quite a bit of gore though, “graphic depictions of violence” definitely earned its spot up there.





	1. from the ashes

**Author's Note:**

> [Shae's comic](http://ichicome.tumblr.com/post/158843456197/page-1-page-2-ichigo-ducks-narrowly-avoiding) brings the story to life! Page 2 coming soon.
> 
> This is my opus. Expect rolling updates past IRBB posting dates too!
> 
> Thank you, Shae, for the art and enthusiastic encouragement! Thank you, Mo, for beta’ing. And thank you to Kubo Tite, for at least starting out with a great series (and fuck you too, you’re an ass and a half).

Some say the world will end in fire,  
Some say in ice.  
From what I’ve tasted of desire  
I hold with those who favor fire.  
But if it had to perish twice,  
I think I know enough of hate  
To say that for destruction ice  
Is also great  
And would suffice.  
-"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost

Life off the grid, in hiding, is never as exciting as everyone seems to think. Unless doing odd jobs, getting tutored by a goofy father with a questionable medical doctorate, and dodging sneezes from the occasional flu patient can be deemed “exciting.” The Kurosaki family have a quiet private clinic in a rural, middle-of-nowhere village; the twin teen girls Karin and Yuzu play nurse to their eccentric, bearded father Isshin, and Ichigo works at a nondescript shop called Unagi-ya. He doesn’t do much more than carry groceries back and forth from the grocery store in town a mile away. That’s all the excitement they ever see.

One would think a family of wanted criminal mutants would have a more interesting day-to-day life.

Steam billows up around the Kurosaki siblings’ faces, the temperature all the way up on the faucet as they clean the dishes in the sink from dinner; Isshin is in the other room, writing in his journal or doing something else equally mundane, Ichigo figures. They do this every day. Yuzu scrubs with soap. Karin rinses. Ichigo dries and puts them away.

Literally rinse and repeat.

Ichigo leans back, blowing a sigh out that disrupts the steam that should be burning them. There are no oven mitts or fire extinguishers in the house. They don’t need them. As far as Ichigo is concerned his resistance to heat and fire are all the mutant powers he inherited from his parents, while Yuzu and Karin also developed low-level twin telepathy. Isshin tells him he’s just as strong as his mother Masaki was, but he doesn’t feel special. Muscular hypertrophy is hardly a super-power, and Ichigo remembers his mother—she was much stronger than he is, in every way. 

In a nowhere town like this, he wouldn’t mind being bored out of his skull so much but it’s the unique sense of helplessness there is attached to it, the inability to change his fate. Thrown in a constant loop. He only just turned eighteen and the only exciting thing that he’s done was last night when he snuck off to go drinking with his friends. 

The three are quiet as they work. It doesn’t bother Ichigo so much, except that he knows Yuzu and Karin are speaking through their link. He can see them exchanging looks, side-glancing him throughout their silent conversation.

He doesn’t so much as smile as his perpetual frown lessens. “What?” He nudges Karin with his elbow.

Yuzu and Karin give each other another look, obviously deciding who should say it aloud. Yuzu is the one to pipe up, “Do you remember our old house?” She adds quietly, “With Mom?”

He does. His sisters were only four when they moved, but Ichigo remembers the resistance. Isshin never talks about it; rarely ever stops talking about Masaki herself, but never about what they used to do. Sometimes Ichigo thinks his time with their mother, going to school with other children of mutants and the whispered meetings in the middle of the night, was all a dream.

Ichigo opens his mouth to answer when Isshin bursts into the kitchen, a panicked look on his face. When she turns around, Yuzu is so shocked she drops the soapy plate in her hand, shattering at her feet. He looks pale and stricken, breath shallow.

He grabs Ichigo by the shoulders. “You need to hide!” he exclaims.

“D-Dad…?” starts Ichigo.

But before he can say anything more, a white oblong _thing_ stabs through the roof into his father’s shoulder. Arterial spray rains down on the Kurosaki siblings as Isshin lurches forward by the force of it, grip tightening on Ichigo. For the split second Ichigo’s brain is allowed to process this, the weapon jutting from his father’s shoulder looks like the faceless head of an ivory snake—then there is a sickening crunch, and gray spikes burst through the ends of it, narrowly missing Ichigo’s own chest by a mere inch. 

Isshin sags, chest snagging on the spikes, but is able to look into Ichigo’s eyes once more. “Take care of your sisters,” he rasps, before being wrenched from him, nails scrabbling painfully into Ichigo’s shoulders and ripping his shirt.

He hits the ceiling with an awful _crack!_ and the room bursts into flame.

Ichigo has barely enough time to put his arms around his sisters, the explosion blasting them back against the sink. Black smoke clouds their vision but their dense skin protects them from the fire licking at everything around them. Ichigo stands over the twins, back taking the brunt of the roof when it collapses. He grunts, but endures the cuts and bruises, holding it up and away from Yuzu and Karin. 

Karin holds on to Yuzu, passed out in her arms. She stares up in awe at their big brother. He always denied his super-strength, they’ve never seen him like this. 

“Is she okay?” groans Ichigo, back straining against the fallen roof.

Karin nods. “There’s no bump on her head. She’s okay, Ichi-nii, she just fainted.”

“That’s good,” he sighs in relief. He kneels closer to them, waiting. 

But for what? For the attacker to get away? For his dad to bleed out?

_Fuck that._

He throws off the rubble of the roof to the side, whipping around and trying to wipe his father’s blood out of his eyes with his sleeves. He can taste it when he licks his lips, nearly gagging, the metallic stench of it stuck in his nose. The flames continue to ravage the rapidly collapsing house, casting an orange hue over their once home. All Ichigo knows is fire and moon and smoke and stars—and keeping himself between this new bright, horrible world and his sisters. When he squints through the haze, he can finally see…

His dad, sprawled and bloody; his limbs look wrong, angles sharp, acute, painful. 

He’s not moving. Ichigo can’t tell if he’s breathing. He takes a step to run to him, but knows he can’t leave Yuzu and Karin, even so short a distance, even for just a moment. And there is something else that keeps him back—fear. It slips icy cold into his belly when he sees the creature that attacked his father. 

“Blew up his own god damn house,” it whines through tears, nursing the blasted-off end of a tentacle with a mass of other terribly snake-like arms. “I thought he had…” 

Not _it_ , Ichigo realizes. _Him_. He is a person, a _mutant like his family_ , but he is monstrous. Black hair cropped in a bob and uneven bangs in a diagonal slash expose a diamond-shaped tattoo the same color as his flashing violet eyes. In place of arms, he has two tentacles at the end of long sleeves, the others protrude from his back as if they burst from his skin in some horrific alternative to angel wings. 

“...Kids,” the attacker finishes, spotting the Kurosaki siblings. His tentacles spread out like a peacock fanning its tail, ready to impale them.

Ichigo is frozen in place. Besides some considerable strength and a ludicrous resistance to heat, Ichigo is powerless. What can he do against a monster? Before he can hoarsely yell to the attacker to spare his sisters, to trade his own life, anything, someone cuts him off.

“Luppi.” The voice is impossibly deep, more vibration than real sound as if Ichigo can feel it reverberating in his ribcage rather than hear it with his ears. The single word is injected with authority and bone-shaking power. 

Ichigo’s knees almost buckle when he sees the source of the voice. While the other, Luppi as he was called, is small and slight, the terrifying appendages foreign and strange additions to an otherwise unintimidating and unimposing figure, the man approaching them is anything but. He is stick thin but a hulking seven feet tall, broad chest and long legs. A white eyepatch cover his right eye, face framed by long black hair like dripping oil. And his arms… 

He has four of them. And each holds a giant, long-shafted scythe.

Luppi has also frozen where he’s standing at the newcomer’s voice. Even through the distracting glow of the fire, Ichigo can see his chest isn’t moving; he’s holding his breath. Behind Ichigo, Karin grips a fist into the back of his shirt, pulling him back as if to safety.

“You’re injured. Pick up the good doctor,” commands the other, voice like grating gravel. But his eyes are on Ichigo, never leaving him as he steps back closer to his sisters.

“Haa-ah, Nnoitra,” sighs Luppi, relaxing. “You always get all the fun.” But he does as he says, the eerie tendrils from his back snaking under Isshin’s limp body and half-lifting, half-dragging him back to his side.

Isshin groans as he’s moved, eyes fluttering but still unconscious. A piece of Ichigo lightens to see signs of life, but he still doesn’t know how to save him. He wants to yell but he can’t find his voice. Karin’s nails bite into his skin through the shirt, her grip tightens on Yuzu’s arm.

The man named Nnoitra grins toothily, showing a neat row of white tombstones. Next he says, more for his own sake than anyone else’s: “What did Ulquiorra say? We don’t need the brats.” Ichigo sees a flash of ink on his tongue when he speaks.

It’s then that Ichigo’s knees start to violently shake beneath him as he comes to the realization that Nnoitra means to kill them. _Calm down!_ he internally screams, hands gripping his thighs, as Nnoitra steps casually toward him, twirling the heavy scythes on his twenty fingers like they weigh nothing. 

He prays his voice doesn’t shake when he shouts, “Fight me!” He swallows, resisting Karin when she tries to hold him back. “Leave my sisters alone, and fight me!”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” retorts Nnoitra with a smirk.

“Oh, that is _pathetic_ ,” comments Luppi, dangling and swinging Isshin like a dead fish on a hook.

Ichigo takes a step forward, shaking off Karin’s weak protests of, “No, Ichi-nii, no, please. Run.”

His voice is stronger now, projecting loudly. “Why don’t you throw away those sword things? Fight me like a real man?” His chest is puffed up and he stands as tall as he can. Sharp jaw set defiantly, shoulders broad and proud under singed, ripped clothes, orange hair looking like a flame itself in the glow of the surrounding fires. His lips quirk into a brave grin, exuding faux confidence. “I’m unarmed. You already have the advantage. Fight me like a man.”

“Sorry, brat,” says Nnoitra with no apology in his tone when he reaches them, towering over Ichigo. “The emperor doesn’t hire ‘men.’” His nightmarish grin widens. “Only monsters.”

Ichigo ducks, narrowly avoiding the first swing at his head. He stays low, kneeling and turning his back to cover his sisters. He wraps his arms around them just as Yuzu is regaining consciousness, now wide-eyed with fear. 

The emperor, Nnoitra said. Government goons, that’s what these guys are. He can’t believe it. Emperor Aizen’s supposed anti-mutant regime employs the most terrible of mutants to carry out their agenda. Ichigo feels ill.

“It’s okay,” he lies to his sisters, turning back to look at Nnoitra as he winds up his top two arms to swing down on him. “It’s going to be okay.”

He squeezes his eyes shut against the impact. 

A loud _thud!_ rings in Ichigo’s ears and the floor beneath him shakes. He winces, but he feels nothing. It’s just a delay, he thinks, that his body must be n shock. He sits there, waiting for the pain, for the gush of blood. But it never comes.

He opens his eyes to the most beautiful sight he’s ever seen.

Standing between them is what looks like a statue of a woman constructed entirely of diamond. She is dazzling in a plain white one-piece with two slits to each hip; every inch of her skin is sparkling, jagged, iridescent. Even her chin-length hair has the same shimmer with a tendril splitting her ethereal face, indistinguishable from the rest of her carved features. She is so small, barely half her adversary’s height, but her fists are raised above her head crossed over at the wrists to block Nnoitra’s blow at the base of the blades; her long legs are stanced firmly apart. 

She is fearless.

Ichigo turns round fully, arms still spread protectively in front of his sisters as he stares up in awe. The tip of the blades hang only a foot above his face. Time seems to slow as the figure turns to look back at him, shining in the glow of the flame.

“That’s—!” shouts Luppi. “Nnoitra, don’t—!”

He’s too late, Nnoitra is already winding up for another blow. Clearly thinking her initial defense just a fluke, he adds the remaining two scythes in his assault, bringing them straight down over her head. Ichigo shuts his eyes again.

But she meets Nnoitra with the same unyielding strength—though her feet sink slightly into the groaning floor, the business end of the scythes even closer to Ichigo’s head. Again, he lets the breath he was holding rush out of him. 

However, Nnoitra doesn’t look surprised. In fact, he’s smiling wretchedly. As the smile splits his face, a slit opens on each of Nnoitra’s flanks like a ripping seam. Before Ichigo can shout a warning, two new appendages shoot out to punch the woman’s core.

A shock-wave travels up the length of the arms as Nnoitra cries out in pain, his fists crushed against the incredible armor of her skin.

The diamond woman smirks, taunting, “Break your hands, Nnoitra?” Her voice is cold and crystalline, like the clinking of ice cubes in glass.

She doesn’t even wait the beat for the one-liner to sink in, but crosses the fists above her head into the scythes, shattering them. Shards of the blades rain down on her, deflecting off her unfazed skin. Nnoitra staggers back, off-balance. The woman doesn’t waste time. Pulling back an arm, she concentrates her power to her drawn elbow so the edge is crystallized into a sharp, jagged point. Before Nnoitra can hold up any of his six arms to defend himself, she already has a running start: she digs in her heels and throws all her strength into a jab to his abdomen.

Nnoitra is bodily thrown back, choking up blood. 

“I could have aimed lower,” she states matter-of-factly, as if castrating were a casual activity.

“You bitch—!” spits Nnoitra, mouth red. Swaying, he looks in danger of toppling over, muttering curses under his breath. It’s Luppi who comes to his rescue, propping him up by his tentacles and pulling him back a safe distance.

She doesn’t seem to care. Instead, she turns around to face Ichigo and absently shakes off the blood on her elbow, returning her arm to its previous, less-stabby form. “Can you stand?” she asks, looking to each of them with cold eyes. Her irises are barely distinguishable from the rest of her eyes, liquid in hue.

They nod silently.

“That will not stop him for long,” she explains, without explaining much of anything. Her speech is both chilling and old-fashioned. Like her voice, the hand she holds out has no warmth to it, harder than anything Ichigo has ever felt. She pulls him up with ease. “We need to run.”

“Who _are_ you?” demands Ichigo, incredulous. At his full height, she only meets his shoulders.

“Kuchiki Rukia,” she answers quickly. “Urahara Kisuke sent me when your safehouse was compromised.”

“How was it…?” he begins, but then—a wave of nausea and grim realization hits Ichigo. Last night. He left the perimeter with Mizuiro and Keigo, to go _drinking_ of all things. He grits his teeth, but his eyes are big and stricken. “You mean, I did this? This is all my fault?”

Despite the hard planes of her features, Rukia moves fluidly, organically. Her expression, impossibly, softens ever so slightly. She says simply, “That is not what I said.”

“But it’s true,” he counters.

She ignores him, sweeping past to help his sisters stand. “We are wasting time,” she reminds them. But Karin still eyes her warily and doesn’t let her support Yuzu when she tries to.

Ichigo continues to talk to her back. “We can’t leave my old man!”

Rukia turns to give him a look of mild annoyance. “They will not kill your father. But they _will_ kill you and your sisters.” She reiterates, “We must run.”

But then: footsteps.

The smoke clears, as if commanded, and a blandly displeased-looking man emerges. He easily passes by his compatriots, both apparently subordinate by the way they shrink in his presence. Where Luppi is fair and Nnoitra harsh, this one is somewhere in between. He is ghoulishly handsome, skin so pale it almost blends in with the white of his pristine, government-issued garb. His eyes are a piercing green, with two stripes of the same color reaching from the bottom lash to his jaw—as if he were crying emeralds.

When he opens his mouth, he sounds as bored as he looks, with a voice so soft and deep, Ichigo can hardly hear it: “Nnoitra. Luppi. Must I always clean up after your messes?”

Nnoitra coughs, “Ulquiorra—you bastard—”

“Be silent,” growls Ulquiorra, without even glancing at him.

Instantly, Nnoitra shuts his mouth, clawing at his lips as if he were trying to pry them open.

Rukia swears under her breath. When Ulquiorra appeared, she hoped that he wasn’t the mutant she had heard of before, but that hope is now dashed at the sight of Nnoitra wrestling with his own mouth. “Kurosaki Ichigo—” she starts, holding up her hand to grab onto him, but he’s already stepping out of her reach.

“Are you the one in charge?” he demands, yelling. His fists are balled at his side. Feeling a fire in the very marrow of his bones, he’s ready to punch someone. He’s ready to show what this “super-strength” can do; that he’ll do what it takes to protect his family. He may need this strange woman’s help, but he’s ready for a fight.

Ulquiorra seems to mull the question over, pursing blackened lips in thought as he looks back at the others behind him with mild disdain. “I suppose I am.”

Ichigo needs no more explanation to propel himself forward, strength in his limbs making him move inhumanly fast. He reaches back a fist aimed at Ulquiorra’s head.

“Ichigo—!” yells Rukia, chasing after him. 

Rukia knows that Ulquiorra is a powerful psychic, specializing in mental torture: he is renowned in the government for his skill in implanting images in his enemies’ minds. It can be simply imaginings of a family slaughtered, toxic thoughts swirled through one’s head to the point of madness; or it can be hallucinations, impossible to distinguish from reality. If he finds a grip on Ichigo’s mind, Rukia will fail her mission and Ichigo’s life will be forfeit.

She can’t let that happen. She cannot let any child of Kurosaki Masaki die.

In her diamond form, Rukia is perfectly shielded from psychic interference, but that protection is a double-edged sword: she does not have access to her wealth of psychic abilities. If she wants to shield the Kurosaki siblings, she must change back.

It starts with her hand, the shimmer peeling back in a sheen of light and exposing her skin from the tips of her fingers. Without her armor, her feelings come flooding back in a rush of panic and fear and worry. And above all, grief. In this tiny glimpse of a moment, everything a swirling mess in her soul, she feels no different than the unbridled Ichigo; she wants fists flying, she wants to save Isshin from the grasp of these terrible men. Overwhelmed though she is, Rukia continues to run toward Ichigo to shield him before it’s too late.

Rukia’s creamy skin is now to her elbow; if she can just touch him—

Barely even looking surprised, Ulquiorra surveys Ichigo’s swift approach calmly. With the same spiritless expression he’s been sporting since he arrived, he holds up a single finger in defense. Rukia is only inches away, fingertips stretched as far as they can go, when something extraordinary happens.

Ulquiorra’s eyes widen in surprise. And Ichigo punches him in the face.

He flies back by the force of Ichigo’s blow, almost comically, landing in a heap. It didn’t work; Ulquiorra has no effect on Ichigo. Sighing with untold relief, Rukia instantly recoils, arm retreating back into her diamond form and the quiet peace of unfeeling. All she knows now is the urgency of retreat. 

A visible frown is etched on Ulquiorra’s otherwise placid face when he props himself up from his newfound position in the dirt. He spits out the loose tooth in his mouth with an unprecedented air of nonchalance. Obviously seeing Ichigo as a lost cause, his eyes pass over Rukia, then behind her. 

“Dammit!” curses Rukia. She hadn’t thought of the girls. It’s too late to change back and shield them from Ulquiorra’s covert and abrupt attack; she barely has enough time to roughly drag Ichigo back from hitting Ulquiorra again. A physical altercation won’t do anything to cure the poison he’s already poured into Yuzu and Karin’s young minds.

Ichigo protests, resisting Rukia’s grip on his shirt as she pulls him back. She’s barely stronger than him, leveraging her weight underneath him to keep him off balance and on the defensive. 

“We need to save Yuzu and Karin!” she says, jerking him back around so he’s turned away from their adversaries.

“What are you talking about!” groans Ichigo, straining against her. He opens his mouth to yell at her again but he stops dead when he sees his sisters.

Eyes glazed over, they stumble toward them, looking past to Ulquiorra. “Dad!” cries Yuzu. 

Rukia lets go of Ichigo to intercede, catching Karin by the waist. In one fluid motion, she lifts her up as if she weighs nothing despite her being barely smaller than Rukia herself. Unthinking, Ichigo does the same with a sobbing Yuzu.

“They’re hurting him, Onii-chan!” she shouts, clawing at him. “He needs us!”

Ichigo holds fast to the squirming Yuzu. “What’s happening!” he yells at Rukia.

“They are hallucinating,” she says simply. And this time, instead of telling him to run again, she takes off. 

“Tch,” mutters Ichigo under his breath, but he follows after her.

Behind them, Ulquiorra picks up his discarded tooth, scrutinizing it between his fingers. 

Luppi grimaces. “Is it okay to let them go? Shouldn’t we follow them?”

“We only need Isshin,” says Ulquiorra, looking back at him and his warped tentacles wrapped around their captive. “For now.”


	2. shelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I am… numb, in this form,” she responds carefully. “You will not find satisfaction in my answers.”
> 
> “Tell me anyway.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This update comes a little later than I expected, but here we are. It's still the first time I've properly posted a second chapter to a WIP so, progress. Enjoy!
> 
> Thanks again for the beta read, Mo!

Ichigo’s legs burn. He doesn’t know how long they’ve been running for, his arms still held so tightly around Yuzu he’s afraid he’s hurting her. She can’t seem to stop sobbing; begging him to turn back, that Dad’s still back there, how could he be so cruel. Beside him, Rukia is running just as ruthlessly fast through the woody outskirts of their sleepy nowhere town; she’s the first person who’s ever been able to keep up with him, maybe even outstrip him if she had a mind to. Poor Karin gathered in her arms is even more adamant than Yuzu, beating her fists bloody on Rukia’s diamond skin. 

“This would be much easier if I could use my mind-control,” says Rukia in monotone, barely bothered by Karin’s repeated punches and screaming in her ear. “I will help them when I change back.”

“Change back?” gasps Ichigo. “What are you—” 

But before he can finish his sentence, Rukia pulls back her arm and swiftly knocks Karin out with the side of her hand.

“H-hey!” shouts Ichigo. 

Yuzu cries harder in his arms; Rukia casually knocks her out too.

Ichigo stops in his tracks, hoisting the limp Yuzu higher. “What the _hell_?”

“We cannot stop,” she says calmly, but he hears the barest hint of annoyance in her voice. “I would knock you out too but I cannot carry all three of you to safety.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring,” snarks Ichigo. “Are you even _human_?”

Normally Rukia would be hurt by a question like that, especially from another mutant, but now she is only annoyed. “Do I look human?” she asks dispassionately.

Sheepish, Ichigo answers quietly, “I don’t know.” He adds with a sigh, “Sorry. I just don’t know who you are or why you’re here.”

Despite not physically needing to breathe, Rukia takes a deep breath before telling him, “I am trying to save your family. You must trust me.” Her eyes pierce through him, sparkling in the low light far away from the fire consuming the Kurosaki house. “Please.” 

He stares at her before asking carefully, “Why should I trust you?” _Why_ do _I trust you?_ He has barely known this woman an hour, but something pulls him to her. 

A mirthless smile crosses her statuesque features. “I came to save you.” She turns and runs, hoping he will follow her again.

Against what he thinks must be his better judgement, he does. 

 

They run until Ichigo thinks his legs might fall off, when Rukia finally stops at a clearing in front of a small knoll.

“It’s here,” she says cryptically, staring at the ground. 

Without another word, she hands Karin over to Ichigo. A teenager in each arm, Ichigo watches her as she impassively stomps at the grass. With her feet she feels around the little bump until it opens like a clam with a _hiss_ of air. Ichigo shrugs, impressed.

Silently, Rukia retrieves Karin from Ichigo, slinging her over her shoulder. She beckons him to follow her down the hidden ladder. It leads to a grubby, gray one-room bunker, nondescript and craggy like it was hollowed out and then lined with cement. It is unadorned besides a few cots with ugly wool blankets, a shadeless lamp with a single bulb, and a shelved cubby stocked full. It is nearly spilling out with instant ramen, bottled water, a pick-up sticks pile of disposable chopsticks, a simple pot, and a single-burner hot plate. The smell of it is stale but earthy, not as unpleasant as Ichigo expects. The “door” closes behind them, enshrouding them in darkness save for the faint, ultraviolet glow of Rukia’s body.

“Homey,” comments Ichigo when he steps off the ladder. 

Rukia flicks the switch on the lamp and points to the cot beside where she lay down Karin. Yuzu whimpers when he tucks her in, eyebrows knit and sweat on her forehead. Karin, too, is muttering in her sleep. Nightmares.

“What did he do to them?” he asks mournfully, smoothing back Yuzu’s hair. She’s almost feverish from stress.

“Ulquiorra is a powerful psychic. They are seeing shadows,” explains Rukia, stepping beside him. “I can help them but I need to change back and I will be weak in my other form.” Although her diamond body is near tireless, she was already exhausted before she had to reach them. She ran all night and all day toward the Kurosaki house while their only teleporter was off the grid on another mission. 

“Your other form?”

She nods, leaning her granite-cold body into his side. His hands go up in a confused dance, not sure where to put them. He can feel her transmutation against him like a shiver down his spine. The shine of her skin melts away as if she were thawing, revealing smooth, pale skin and midnight hair. With a sigh she almost falls and he catches her in his arms, hands big on her waist and hip. She is the exact opposite of her other form: warm and soft. Ichigo tries to focus on a crack in the wall and not her heat and how it seems to burn through him like whiskey in his belly.

For Rukia, turning back from her diamond form is like coming down from a high. All her empathy, guilt, and torrid of feelings come rushing back, bones heavy with it as if complicated emotions had a true, tangible weight to them. She tries to push them aside, narrowing her focus to helping the Kurosaki twins. 

Ichigo watches her work, steadying her. She has a gentle beauty to her, he notices, unlike the hard, terrifying allure of her other form. She starts with Yuzu, fingers carding softly through her hair as she plunges herself into her mind. 

Cleaning up after just a touch from Ulquiorra isn’t too difficult but it’s no walk in the park either. The damage he has done from just a moment is substantial, but it’s not anything she can’t handle. Their link, she finds, is what complicates things; she cleans one and the other leaks poison into the first. She splits the work between their two minds, fingers nestling in the hair of both their heads. Although Rukia doesn’t pry, she finds she likes their minds; without delving too deep, psyches have a certain aura, and theirs are warm like home. She can’t scrub their memories into oblivion, but she can make it out like it was just a bad dream. And give them some good ones too.

“Done,” she sighs tiredly, when she pulls her hands away. She turns back to look Ichigo in the eyes. Her voice is deep but pretty, melodic, and full of kindness when she sincerely tells him, “Thank you.”

Ichigo almost laughs. _For what? Letting you save my family?_ But he doesn’t know how to respond as she continues to stare him down. He shifts uncomfortably under the scrutiny of her intense indigo eyes, even more beautiful now than when they were diamonds. 

While Ichigo squirms beneath her gaze, Rukia is trying to read his mind. She meets a familiar block, like Ulquiorra must have when he tried to penetrate his psyche—and just like Masaki’s. She sighs again, slumping her shoulders forward. She wants to apologize to Ichigo for leaving Isshin behind, for being short with him, for never having known him and his sisters until now. 

Instead, she turns back to stone, frosting over like winter. “Take the other cot,” she tells him, weaving around him and grabbing a water bottle from the shelf. She holds it out in offering. “I’ll stand guard. Tomorrow someone will pick us up, take us to real safety.”

“I can keep a lookout,” he tells her, not yet wanting to ask what or where ‘real safety’ means. He sits on the edge of Yuzu’s cot, opening the bottle. “I won’t be able to sleep anyway,” he admits, wetting his hands and attempting to gently wash the blood off of Yuzu’s face. She doesn’t stir from the cold, too exhausted.

Rukia leans against the cot opposite him, beside Karin. “This body does not need sleep,” she says, gesturing at herself. Her lips turn in something akin to a smile, a softness among the hard lines of her gemstone face. “I will look after your sisters. You do not have to worry.”

He just barely grins, standing up to do the same for Karin. “Who are you?”

“I told you I am Kuchiki Rukia. I was sent by—”

Ichigo interrupts, “Ura-something Kiss-whatever, yeah. That means nothing to me.” He sits back down, leaning forward. “Who _are_ you?”

“I am… numb, in this form,” she responds carefully. “You will not find satisfaction in my answers.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She folds her hands in front of her thighs, and gives an inviting shrug. “What do you want to know?”

He takes a moment to think. “How did you find us?”

“Your boss, Unagiya Ikumi, works with us. Her son is a mutant.”

Bewildered, Ichigo asks, “Kaoru?” 

She nods. “An early bloomer. He can track the location of any living human, especially mutants he has met. He knew you breached the perimeter shielding around your town, and contacted the society.”

“The society… that’s the resistance?”

“More than that, it is our only home, the sole society for mutants,” she replies.

“My parents…” he starts, licking his lips, “they were its leaders.”

With a wry smile, Rukia admits, “Masaki more than Isshin. Urahara took the mantle after…” Rukia is grateful this form does not betray her emotions, but her pause speaks volumes anyway. “After you left. But it is still your birthright. It belongs to you.”

He squints at her, frown deepening. “You knew them,” he intuits. But then he scoffs at himself. “What am I saying? You’re way too young.”

“I am older than I look,” she says, slightly irritated. Having to communicate in so stunted a version of herself is uniquely frustrating, everything muted but still too personal. Before Ichigo can pry any further, she cuts him off: “This place is a temporary shelter. Sealed, with a limited air supply. Speaking wastes oxygen.” She adds, matter-of-factly, “You will use less if you sleep.”

He can’t help but hold his breath in response.

Flicking a thumb over her shoulder at the cot on the other side of Karin, Rukia mouths, _Go to sleep._

He nods awkwardly, standing up and walking toward the cot. When he passes her, he pauses a moment. “Thanks,” he says without turning. 

Rukia stares straight ahead and takes one last, steadying breath before sitting in silent stillness the rest of the night. In the peaceful quiet, she listens to the proof of life going in and out of the Kurosaki siblings and feels only contentment.

 

Morning comes too soon as far as Ichigo is concerned. He is used to waking up early, but he opens his eyes to the most all-encompassing exhaustion in his life, clothes sticky with dried sweat and blood. The cuts and bruises from the roof falling on him sting, pain settled into his bones in the night.

“Good morning,” greets Rukia softly with her strange metallic voice when his eyes open, a light glow around her in the dark of the bunker. She has only moved once in the night, now sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the food cubby. She looks like a serene yoga statue. 

He sits up slowly with a groan, scrubbing his face with his hands. 

Rukia quirks her mouth. “We have healers at the society,” she assures him in reply to his pained moans. She extracts a couple water bottles, the pot and the hotplate from the cubby, and a packet of ramen. “I’ll make breakfast. Wake your sisters.”

He stands creakily, lungs stuttering with a tired sigh. He wakes them gently, hand light on Karin’s shoulder and a whisper. Through the link, Karin in turn wakes Yuzu; both of them panic, feeding off each other’s sudden fear. 

“Shh, sh,” quiets Ichigo, going around Karin’s cot to kneel between them. “It’s okay, we’re safe now.”

Karin sits up, glaring at Rukia where she sits on the floor, pouring bottled water into the pot. To Ichigo, she mutters, “What is _she_ doing h—”

“It’s alright, she’s…” Ichigo pauses, turning to look at Rukia, eyes caught in her gaze. “She’s a friend.”

Rukia dips her head in a grateful nod.

During a family-style breakfast of ramen noodles around the pot, Ichigo tries to explain their current situation to the twins. Rukia calmly fills in blanks she can but she remains mostly tight-lipped, lets Ichigo verbally process the previous day’s events, and refuses to eat a bite. 

“Today,” he says, fishing out the last of the noodles, “Rukia is taking us somewhere safe. Remember our old town, before we moved? We’re going back.” 

His sisters look up at him, brave-faced. In that moment, Ichigo can’t help but think that he’s not the only one who inherited his mother’s strength.

Without cleaning up after them, Rukia ushers the Kurosakis up the ladder. 

“Where are we going?” queries Yuzu quietly.

“Meeting a friend,” replies Rukia as she guides them back into the woods from where they came. “Shihouin Yoruichi. A teleporter, untraceable. She’ll take us home.”

Home. The word echoes in Ichigo’s mind, rattling around with untold meaning. 

They stop in a thicket of the forest, leaning against trees as they wait. They are there for longer than is comfortable to be sitting in silence, anxious and surrounded by woods. Just as Ichigo internally thinks that at least they have a lot of cover, if they are even still being targeted, Yoruichi finally shows up.

Like a glitch of code, Yoruichi suddenly appears. Her edges are ragged and uneven before taking proper shape in the form of a gorgeous black woman, with honey-hued eyes and sleek hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Towering over Rukia and the twins but still smaller than Ichigo, she’s clad in a garish, orange lamé crop-top jacket over a charcoal-colored catsuit so tight it looks like it was painted on.

The Kurosakis jump at her approach but Rukia hardly reacts, only offering a small nod in greeting.

A smirk plays on Yoruichi’s thin lips. “Hey there!” she greets amicably. “I’m Yoruichi. Grab hold.” Rukia returns her smile, in a mechanic sort of way, while taking hold of her hand. Yoruichi extends her other arm to the Kurosaki siblings. When they are slow on the uptake, she impatiently shakes it a little. “Come on,” she sing-songs, raising her eyebrows.

Trying not to blush, Ichigo awkwardly opts for her elbow while Yuzu gets her wrist and Karin her hand.

“Got a good grip?” Yoruichi asks Ichigo raunchily, squeezing off a wink in his direction.

Before Ichigo can even squawk in embarrassment, the air is forcibly sucked from his lungs as Yoruichi whisks them away. Teleporting feels like being plunged in ice water then ripped in half, almost too quickly to even register. 

In the space of a blink, Ichigo opens his eyes to a whole new world.

A city sprawls out before him, golden-brown roofs topping countless traditional-looking homes, making up an intricate maze of side-streets and alleyways leading to a large building at the center. The epicenter is the most improvised-looking part of the cityscape, like several houses slapped together. Whether they are underground or in some kind of alternate pocket dimension, wherever they are, it looks more like a movie set than the headquarters of a band of revolutionaries. 

Rukia sweeps out her palm, as if in introduction. “Welcome,” she tells Ichigo. “This is your empire.”


End file.
